Petition launched to force better service from GEBE

POSTED: 11/9/11 1:00 AM

St. Maarten – Businesses and residents in especially Philipsburg dealt with power outages on Tuesday because of damage to a feeder cable. This is the preliminary assessment that was released by utility company GEBE on its website www.nvgebe.com and its Facebook page. A more exhaustive statement on the outages was not available at press time.
In their initial post around noon the company reported that there was an electrical problem in the GEBE distribution grid had led to an outage on the Philipsburg side of the Cole Bay Hill. The only unaffected areas were Belair and Cay Hill. An update issued an hour later stated that technicians were working to restore power. The final update came two hours into the outage and stated, “Cable was damaged by contractor in Indigo Bay. We have now managed to reroute some cables, resulting in power being restored to Philipsburg.” That restoration did not hold as power went off before stabilizing late in the day.
This is the second time that residents had to deal with outages and in a sign of frustration someone named Tatu Caron started a petition which can be found at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/gebe_needs_to_change/. The petition, amongst other things, calls for people to stop paying their bills instead of doling out their money to pay ransom.
“GEBE has lost sight of the fact the electricity is our right. We are not asking for a privilege. We are demanding to be provided with something we have paid for,” one line of the petition states.
Up until press time no one had signed the petition.